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Macaulay Honors College
at Baruch, Spring 2011Professor Els de Graauw
ITF Emily Sherwood -
Authors
▪ Alyssa Alicino
▪ Brandon Baksh
▪ Ru Xiao Chen
▪ Belinda Chiu
▪ Els de Graauw
▪ Becca Glickman
▪ Elisabeth Greenberg
▪ Doris Hu
▪ Peky Huang
▪ Toby Joseph
▪ Haesol Jun
▪ Nika Kartvelishvili
▪ Farrukh Khan
▪ Holly Kiang
▪ Julian Kipnis
▪ Kar Yi Lim
▪ Yang Lin
▪ Cait McCarthy
▪ Sofya Moshkovich
▪ Mariya Tuchinskaya
▪ Ying Zhang Login
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We Don’t Vote for Small Things
Svetlana, a 41-year-old immigrant from Russia, has been living here for 15 years. She commented how she and her husband do not tend to participate in local elections:
My husband and I are registered to vote, and we do vote but mostly in major elections. We don’t really vote for small things like councilmen and stuff like that. We don’t really do anything else. We’re not that politically active. We just vote… It’s not that we don’t care about local politics. We just feel like we’re not that informed… like we’re not informed enough to vote for these smaller elections and make a good decision. So, we just kind of stay out of it.”
Finding Employment is No Easy Feat for a New Immigrant
Svetlana, 41, immigrated to the United States from Russia and has been living here for 15 years. She recounts her difficulties in finding a job at first:
At first, it was pretty difficult to find work, mostly because we didn’t know English and also because our degrees were worthless here. We had to settle for very basic entry-level jobs… like I said before my husband’s first job was as a Sear’s repair guy and he was lucky to get that and I worked mostly temporary office jobs. After I got my degree and my husband got more experience here though, it became a lot easier and we were able to find good jobs.”
Jewish People Constantly Discriminated Against
Svetlana, 41, emigrated from Russia to the United States and has been living here for 15 years. She explains how discrimination in Russia drove her to migrate to the United States:
Life in Russia was pretty difficult, especially for me because I’m Jewish and in Russia Jewish people were treated with a lot of animosity and they were discriminated against almost everywhere they went. […] My father even had to change our family’s name from X to Y to make it sound more Russian than Jewish so that my sister and I wouldn’t be made fun of in school. […] Getting into college in Russia wasn’t easy at all, once again especially because we were Jewish. Most Jewish people never got into any top universities or any good school… no matter how good their grades were, no matter how much they were qualified. I didn’t even bother applying to the university that I really wanted to go to because I knew that there was no chance that I would get in just because I’m Jewish.”
